Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2 Hands On

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Impressions from the closed multiplayer beta.

By Steve Butts

Ever since the first Rainbow Six, the Clancy franchise has set a number of new standards for the shooter genre. Gaming technology and military hardware have changed a lot in the nine years since that first title was released and with Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2Ubisoft is hoping to bring the series not just up to date but into the future. We've been playing the recent multiplayer beta over the last few days and are excited to see what else the designers have in store for us.

The new game focuses on a hypothetical threat from Mexican rebels in the year 2014. The Ghosts, armed with the latest weapons and the advanced Integrated Warfighter System, have been assigned to patrol the wall recently erected along the 1,900 mile US-Mexico border. As the rebels make their way across the wall, the Ghosts will find themselves fighting in border towns, scorching deserts, high mountains and even out in the West Texas town of El Paso.

While we'll be sure to bring you more details of the campaign in the future, right now the focus is on the multiplayer action. The new beta includes two separate team-based modes and one map type. In Recon vs. Assault, players will divide into assault and defend teams and compete in an objective based challenge. Players who would rather focus just on the tactics of engagement can get their fill in the team-based deathmatch mode.

Both game types take place in a dense, rundown urban location called Calavera. The name itself means "skull" in Spanish and resonates with ominous connections to the Dia de Los Muertos. The cramped location means that firefights take place at close ranges, so while sprinting might be a good way to get across large open areas, you'll want to creep around with your weapon drawn when rounding the corners of buildings or fences. You can see from the screens in our media section just how crowded the maps can be. Rather than giving players a sense of security when surrounded by walls, the options for players to get up on roofs means that death can come from any direction.

The Recon vs. Assault mode tasks the Ghost team with destroying three Air Defense Anti-Tank Systems (ADATS) in preparation for a massive air strike. The Rebels can win by defending all the ADATS or eliminating all the Ghosts. They can also claim a partial victory if they manage to preserve at least one of the ADATS. The ADATS are important targets for the Ghosts, not only for the victory points they give, but also because dead Ghosts only respawn when an ADATS is destroyed.

The Recon team can make use of three different classes -- Rifleman, Sniper or Scout. The Rifleman is armed with the now cancelled M8 carbine, allowing them to engage enemies at all but the longest ranges. The Sniper is armed with the impressive M14 rifle with a long-range scope. Though it's a great rifle at long ranges, Snipers will likely need to fall back on their M9 sidearm if confronted by an enemy face-to-face. The Scouts are armed with the ubiquitous suppressed version of the MP5 and AN-M8 smoke grenades.

More importantly, the Scouts have a heartbeat sensor that they can use to tag enemies both out in the open and behind structures. Once tagged, an enemy shows up as a small red diamond on every friendly player's HUD. The range to each enemy is shown within the diamond as well, letting all players exactly where a tagged enemy is located. Players who have been tagged in this manner don't live very long in the games we've played. Once tagged, a player is sure to be hunted by pretty much every opposing player on the map. They can't break cover or even peek around a corner without having a handful of weapons trained right on them. (Interestingly, dead players can use the death cam to tag enemies.)